Stereotypes

Carbon monoxide is of the most deadly of gases- but not because of its potency, or even its compilation. Carbon monoxide can surround you and seep into your lungs before you even know it's there, and in minutes it's scentless and colorless essence will have sucked your life from your body, and you'll have died never knowing what hit you.

As I sat at the computer, here in the main room of my family's house, I heard my sister exclaim in surprise that there was a girl on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader that had answered all the questions correctly. Her surprise, however, came, not in that someone had gotten all the questions right, but in that a cheerleader had.

It's almost disturbing how much a part of everyday life stereotypes have become. And whether or not we beleive we succumb to this manner of thinking, the truth of the matter is, in some way or another, we all have. Stereotypes are all around us, in everything we see, hear, read. Every step we take, they swirl around us in their unseen toxicity, just waiting to choke out our prospective relationships- how could we not begin to believe them?

Of course, there's always a truth inside the lie- certain personality traits, disabilities, habits, even upbringing often influences people into certain circles or actions. And as we feel out our own self, search for the true person we will become, recognizing these is almost imperitive to finding our place in society, the niche where we as a person can be the happiest for ourselves and greatest help to others.

But when we set label to person, description to label, we stop looking for where to belong, stop searching for the better of people, and start putting up fences that block out the possibilities of individuality. Instead of seeing in the crowd the people we will get along with best, we stare out at a sea of cliques, each with an impersonal description set to the beat of a negative tune, and suddenly our list of potential friends is cut in half, and we don't even realize the harm we've just laid upon ourselves. Its amazing how something so simple and virtually undetectable can be the death of something so great and powerful as a friendship, sometimes even before it's had a chance to begin.

If we could learn how to block out stereotypes, to see each person for who they are as an idividual, and not as a label, would we have more friends, or just more respect for the people we've never really clicked with? And if stereotypes are so rampant and virtually undetectable, how can we unlearn what we've been programmed to think?

But then, maybe it's not so much a matter of erasing the old, as it is a matter of writing the new. Maybe, instead of labels,we need to learn personalities, reasons, mindsets. Maybe one day we can all see that people aren't labels, they're just people.